Tips and tutorials related to Pro/Engineer, Excel (primarily) and others like Tcl/tk (occasionally)... I had started another topic on Arduino as well. Here I try to explore the underestimated and uncommon options...

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Friday, 5 September 2008

Compress ProE model beyond what a zip can do.

This is a something I noticed in the past and it an come handy sometimes. So here we go.

When you are in an urgency to send a BIG (in file size) ProE model over e-mail and the zipping is good enough then what would you do.

One possibility is to zip and split into multiple files and send as multiple mails. Then when you receive, you can combine and unzip it.

There is another way. For this you need a small tweaking of the model in ProE. What you do is to make insert mode at the beginning (you can leave one or two features at the beginning in resumed status) and the file size come really down. Don't ask me why. I don't know. In both cases you have the full information needed in the file. But one is very small !! Strange, isn't it.Anyway the sequence is explained below.

* Open the model in ProE* Make the insert mode at the beginning of the model. (you can spare one or two features)* Save the model.* The file size would have reduced drastically.* Now you can further do a zip and it will reduce further.

* When you receive the file. Unzip it and open it in ProE and resume the last set by (Edit -> Resume -> Last) and you have the transfer job done.

I did a small study for you to get some idea. Here are the statistics of it.

No of features in the test model :200

Before doing the Insert Mode

-

% of Original Size

ProE File Size

2,674 KB

100.00%

Zip File Size (without insert option)

1,517 KB

56.73%

-

After doing the Insert Mode

ProE File Size

1,627 KB

60.85%

Zip File Size (with insert option)

995 KB

37.21%

Instead of getting a 44% (100 - 56) compression, you get a 63% (100 - 37) compression. Almost 50% extra compression. Nice incentive for that little effort. In fact, PTC could have used this as an optional feature to allow people to compress the models through the ProE interface. The only difficulty would be that it takes little bit extra time to compress and decompress.

So thats it. Hope it could come handy for you as well some time.Have a nice weekend.

PS: Today, one of my blog post was listed in core77dotcom and some more guys were able to reach my site boz of that. Thanks core77dotcom. Checkout their site.